


Vertigo

by CantStopImagining



Category: Call the Midwife
Genre: F/F, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-09
Updated: 2016-02-09
Packaged: 2018-05-19 07:34:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5959005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CantStopImagining/pseuds/CantStopImagining
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Summer, 1958. Patsy is bad at flirting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vertigo

**Author's Note:**

> A silly little ficlet that came from a conversation about how adorably bad at flirting Patsy Mount is, and a little bit of astonishment at how openly Delia was discussing La Dolce Vita’s fountain scene. Patsy is an awkward little puppy and I love her. 
> 
> Title from the 1958 Hitchcock classic.

Summer, 1958. They’d be touching on Patsy’s bed if it weren’t so damn warm. As it is, she’s slumped against the head board, smoking a cigarette and trying not to let her mind drift to how perfectly the sun is shining across the bare expanse of skin along Delia’s back. It’s difficult not to feel guilty at noticing the soft round curves of her body, the skin stretched over visibly shaped muscles in her slightly tanned legs, slung lazily over the edge of the bed. She knows, now, that there is nothing wrong with her for thinking about this, from taking enjoyment in Delia’s body, but it’s been so long engrained her mind that she _shouldn’t_ that it’s difficult.

Delia’s reading the newspaper. Her hair is up - not in the formal bun she wears to work, but in a messy tangle on the top of her head. Beads of sweat drip down her neck. Patsy is pretending not to notice, her fingers itching to wipe them away.

It isn’t just the heat that’s keeping them from touching.

Still, they are close enough that she can hear the paper crinkle, the faint mumbling from Delia’s lips as she thumbs through its pages, searching for the reviews section. Always the reviews section. Their days are filled enough with sadness, she’d say, avoiding the first few pages. She flicks straight to the reviews, pausing only to briefly let her eyes scour the sports section. Briefly. Dismissively.

“The new Hitchcock’s out on Tuesday,” she says, still flicking through pages, “the Kim Novak one,” she pauses, shoots Patsy a naughty grin, and lowers her eyes back to the paper, “she has the most gorgeous bone structure, don’t you think Pats?”

Patsy feels her cheeks go pink, as they always do when Delia so outrightly asks her opinion on another woman. She envies her, really. Her ability to talk so openly about how she feels. Patsy gets tongue twisted when she attempts to even voice her opinions on Delia much less anybody else. She knows, of course, that it’s natural for women to discuss other women’s looks, and to anybody else it would sound innocent. But she can’t help it. It doesn’t work that way for her.

Instead, she opts for a sharp nod, a quick puff of her cigarette.

“She looks rather like you, I think,” Delia hums, continuing to scour the page.

“Oh, I… I don’t think so,” Patsy says, embarrassed.

Delia raises her eyes at that, a mischievous look on her face. Patsy knows it well.

“I do,” Delia continues, then folds the newspaper in half, tossing it to the floor. She rolls onto her side again, and takes in the whole of Patsy, awkwardly curled into the head of the bed, her face flushed, “you never talk about movie stars.”

Patsy flicks ash from her cigarette absentmindedly into the ashtray at her side, mostly so she has something to occupy her hands, and shifts awkwardly, “what’s to talk about?”

“You must know who you like?”

Lowering her eyes to her lap, Patsy subconsciously wets her lips, wonders what shade of tomato her cheeks are blooming at now. She hates that Delia makes her feel this way. But then, she loves it too, she supposes. Who else could she ever be so open with? In all honesty, she couldn’t hate anything Delia does to her, anyway.

“I don’t know,” she lies, concentrating on flattening out her skirt, not meeting Delia’s eyes. Of course she knows, she’s just never been in a position to share, and whilst ‘shy’ is not naturally a word anybody would necessarily use to describe her (abrasive, confident, efficient… they all seem to contradict it, after all), she can’t help but feel overwhelmingly so when it comes to this.

“You can tell me,” Delia teases, nudging her with her bare foot, “it’s only me, silly.”

Patsy knows she _is_ being silly. It’s Delia. Delia who gushes over Audrey Hepburn and Greta Garbo and women in obscure European films with subtitles that Patsy can’t keep up with. Delia who holds her hand even when Patsy lets go, and kisses her with not a bit of shyness or hesitation, and who has mapped out all her favourite parts of her in kisses and quiet conversation and looks that Patsy pretends not to see. Delia who she's almost certain she’s beginning to fall- no, she’s fallen in love with.  
 Delia who understands her better than anybody else does and who is the only person who she feels she can be herself around.

Her cheeks still red, Patsy raises her eyes to Delia’s, hopes her expression isn’t as strangled as she fears and grimaces, “I think… Katharine Hepburn is… well, unfairly beautiful,” she finally says, and watching the corners of Delia’s lips turn into a beautiful smile - dimples and all - is enough to make her feel marginally less uneasy. She smiles shyly, buries her face in her hands, until Delia peels them away, finger by finger.

“ _You’re_ unfairly beautiful, you know that, Nurse Mount?” she whispers, the hint of laughter in her voice. Her face is so close. Patsy can feel her warm breath against her skin, Delia’s fingers still wrapped tightly around hers.

“Likewise,” she breathes, and presses her lips against Delia’s. 

Perhaps she’s braver than she thinks.

**Author's Note:**

> (Just for the record, Kim Novak looks nothing like Emerald Fennell).


End file.
